A Diode-Pumped Solid-State (DPSS) laser uses a slab, cylinder or thin disk of doped solid-state lasing material, such as crystal or glass, and sometimes includes harmonic generation material as well. The optical pumping and conversion efficiency of solid-state laser materials is highly dependent upon the optical power density of the pump source, the wavelength match between the pump source and the lasing material, the thermal gradient across the lasing material, and the optical coupling to the lasing material. The transverse beam profile is a strong function of thermal effects in the lasing material and the distribution of the optical pump light across the cross-section of the resulting DPSS laser beam.
High power DPSS lasers are typically pumped using a bank of edge-emitting lasers which are either edge-coupled or face-coupled to the material. The bank of pump lasers is typically comprised of a stack of individual or arrayed edge-emitting laser diodes which have relatively large gaps between the lasers creating design limitations for controllable patterns. A prior art solution to this limitation involves aligning a lens and fiber optic combination to each laser in the stack, with the resulting bundle of fibers being collected and mounted to the face of the material. This solution, unfortunately, adds complexity, cost and size to the overall system. This solution is also impractical to implement in an external cavity arrangement because the edge-emitting lasers are mechanically aligned in the array stack and the planar alignment tolerance for an external mirror is extremely critical.